Estimating Consumer Exposure to PFOS and PFOA

Abstract

Perfluorinated compounds have been used for more than 50 years as process aids, surfactants, and for surface protection. This study is a comprehensive assessment of consumer exposure to perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) from a variety of environmental and product-related sources. To identify relevant pathways leading to consumer exposure to PFOS and PFOA a scenario-based approach has been applied. Scenarios represent realistic situations where age- and gender-specific exposure occurs in the everyday life of consumers. We find that North American and European consumers are likely to experience ubiquitous and long-term uptake doses of PFOS and PFOA in the range of 3 to 220 ng per kg body weight per day (ng/kg(bw)/day) and 1 to 130 ng/kg(bw)/day, respectively. The greatest portion of the chronic exposure to PFOS and PFOA is likely to result from the intake of contaminated foods, including drinking water. Consumer products cause a minor portion of the consumer exposure to PFOS and PFOA. Of these, it is mainly impregnation sprays, treated carpets in homes, and coated food contact materials that may lead to consumer exposure to PFOS and PFOA. Children tend to experience higher total uptake doses (on a body weight basis) than teenagers and adults because of higher relative uptake via food consumption and hand-to-mouth transfer of chemical from treated carpets and ingestion of dust. The uptake estimates based on scenarios are within the range of values derived from blood serum data by applying a one-compartment pharmacokinetic model.

Indoor Contamination with Hexabromocyclododecanes, Polybrominated Diphenyl Ethers, and Perfluoroalkyl Compounds: An Important Exposure Pathway for People?

“…Drinking water was found to be an important pathway when water supplies were impacted by a point source of PFOA (92). However, hand-to-mouth contact with carpets was considered a major pathway of PFOS and PFOA exposure for infants, toddlers, and children (89). Moreover, while a Swedish study considered diet the most important exposure route, dust ingestion was significant under scenarios assuming a high dust ingestion rate (93).…”

PBDE exposure from food in Ireland: optimising data exploitation in probabilistic exposure modelling

“…The mean (and not the median) of the food consumption data was also chosen for the intermediate scenario, because it better represents the central tendency of the whole food intake data set. A similar scenario-based approach was already applied in previous studies to model expected dose ranges (Scheringer et al, 2001;Wormuth et al, 2006;Trudel et al, 2008). SBM was implemented with n ¼ 47 food groups, denoted as SBM47, and with n ¼ 9 food groups, denoted as SBM9 (for details with regard to SBM9 see Supplementary Information, section 11).…”

A simple pharmacokinetic model to characterize exposure of Americans to Di-2-ethylhexyl phthalate

“…Similar PK models have been used successfully to study exposures to dioxins (Lorber, 2002;Aylward et al, 2005), PBDEs (Lorber, 2008a), perfluorinated compounds including PFOS and PFOA (Washburn et al, 2005;Trudel et al, 2008), and recently to perchlorate (Lorber, 2008b). These simple models require a minimal set of input parameters; specifically, parameters describing overall dissipation or loss from the body or tissue being modeled, and parameters describing the volume of mixing (in blood, urine, or body fat) are all that are required.…”